2. I don’t have to clean my house or cook dinner because my vibrator wants to come over.

3. I have never once suspected that my vibrator was married or had a girlfriend. My vibrator is faithful, and has sex only with me.

4. After sex, my vibrator has never said: “I’m kind of hungry, can you make us a sandwich?”

5. My vibrator does not ask to check the score of the game before, during, or after sex.

6. My vibrator is never too tired to have sex. It lives in a dark drawer beside the bed and is happy to come out and play whenever I want.

7. My vibrator does not have a Madonna/whore complex and has never earnestly explained to me the difference between sex with good women and bad women. It also does not believe that it respects me too much to have sex with me before it marries me.

8. My vibrator doesn’t have an opinion on my makeup, clothing, or anything that I say or do.

9. There are no awkward silences during conversation with my vibrator. Indeed, we rarely speak at all.

10. I don’t have to date my vibrator.

In all fairness, you should probably read Why men are better than vibrators , too.

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2. It does not turn me on when my vibrator is aroused. Nor is it turned on when I am aroused.

3. My vibrator is not warm, and I can’t put my butt up against it when I want to go to sleep.

4. My vibrator doesn’t kiss on the mouth, or at all. Nor does it hug.

5. My vibrator is not my friend, and doesn’t talk to me on the phone or send me funny text messages. Also, it doesn’t care when I’m feeling blue or ask what it can do to make me feel better. And I’ve never made it laugh.

6. My vibrator does not look hot naked.

7. My vibrator doesn’t care what I look like naked, and does not notice weight loss and benefits of regular exercise at all.

8. I do not miss seeing my vibrator.

9. My vibrator has never surprised me.

10. I don’t get to date my vibrator.

In all fairness, you might also want to read 10 reasons vibrators are better than men

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But there are bad ones, too. Shameful ones.

Directly across from the road where our house was, there’s an old house. Paint peeling, yard tatty, old car sitting in the driveway. It was there when I was growing up, too. There were a lot of people who lived in that house, but it’s only one of them that I remember. And that’s because of something that I did.

He was about 17, and I don’t even remember what his name was. Termite, they called him. They were poor, even more than we were, and it was just him and his Mom and his sister. They didn’t even have a telephone, so they used ours on occasion. His mom would send him over, and he’d walk the quarter mile and come down our driveway, tennis-shoed feet kicking the rocks and making little puffs of dust. It bothered him, I could tell.

I was an angry kid, with no idea why I was angry. I won’t go into the whole dynamics of family drama, but it contributed. Add it to the normal angst of the 15 year old, and I was a hot mess.

I didn’t like him. I don’t remember why. So I told my Dad he was rude to me, and the next time he came over to use the phone, feet dragging, my father made him stand there and take a lecture before he let him use the phone.

I went into my room. I could still hear it, though. I could hear the unwelcome tears in his voice as he protested, the shock and hurt and anger. Then he used the telephone and went home, and he never spoke another word to me again. He never came to use the phone again, either.

I never apologized, and I never told the truth, and I could feel the weight of that today when I saw that battered old house.

So I’d like to say I’m sorry.

I could make excuses, I could explain, tell him that the truth is that I felt powerless and worthless and I twisted those feelings into occasional spiteful acts. I could say that at that age, I didn’t have a lot of empathy, that there were was such a complex mix of emotions roiling inside of me that I didn’t have room to consider other people’s. I could tell him that I’ve thought and regretted many times what I did. But it doesn’t really make any difference why. I can’t take it back.

It was thirty years ago, and it’s still vivid to me. I hope, really I do, that it’s just a small thing to him, something that he shrugged off and doesn’t even remember. I hope it didn’t haunt him, as it does me.

The things we do, the things we’re exposed to, they all have an effect on our future behavior. This taught me empathy, so I’m not sorry for that. But I am sorry for what I did to that poor boy.

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I don’t like change. It requires me to get used to an entirely new way of thinking and living, and once I get into a groove, I don’t want to do it a different way. I like the way that I do things, or I wouldn’t do them that way. I have a routine because it works for me.

Just to give you a quick overview of a few of the things that happened during my totally sucky last year:

My last little chickie went off to college 300 miles away and I, despite my denials to the contrary, fell headlong into empty nest syndrome.

The town where I lived topped the list of high foreclosures (read Living on Nothing but Food Stamps if you’d like a look at the way things have been going there the last couple of years, and how those living high suddenly hit rock bottom when the housing bubble burst) and that meant some (almost all) of my freelance graphics/advertising work was suddenly history. At one point, I was averaging $2000 each month with this, and now it’s one (long-distance) client and a steady $100, and that’s because I’ve had a business relationship with them for more than 10 years. And because I dropped my price.

I lost 50% of my online income because of the ‘restructuring’ of the commissions I earn from some of my artwork (and we all know what that word means, right? It means you’re fucked, while the company doing the restructuring comes out way ahead).

I moved back home (from Florida to Missouri, and I’m currently freezing my arse off, thanks very much) to take care of an elderly aunt who died three months after I got here, and the house that was supposed to have been transferred into my name never was, and I was left without a home and had to move again.

Apparently half of my family (and I have a huge family) doesn’t believe that you can make a living working solely from home and has run around telling the other half many unflattering things about my character. And the fact that the poor economy has made my earnings tank reinforces their belief that I am a liar. This puts me into a bad mood and makes me (on occasion) behave badly.

I quit smoking (okay, this one wasn’t done to me, I did it to myself, but it’s still a big change and therefore it counts. I smoked at least a half a pack a day for the past 30 years. Plus, I’m the one writing this, so I can put things like this wherever I want *sticks out tongue*)

After a lovely round of symptoms that made me and some doctors believe that my MS was rearing its lovely head again, my latest tests have proven otherwise. I got the news yesterday, in the middle of a snowstorm, so I couldn’t even go and get a lovely bottle of wine to drown my sorrows in. It’s early menopause. Yes, children, at 45 I have insomnia, hot flashes, tingling in my hands and feet, occasional rapid heartbeat, and I’m bitchy and/or weepy all the time. And since they don’t believe in letting you have artificial hormones anymore, this is what they tell you: Suffer. You, and everyone around you must suffer. Yeah, because I’m so good at that. *rolls eyes*

There are more, but I’m making myself depressed. Those are the biggies, anyway. My mood has been like an inflatable boat in heavy seas: up and down and up and down and up and down. Enough, already. I’m gonna be sick, and very soon.

Then I got a sharp slap from my son, in the form of something he wrote:

As far as the universe is concerned, we are, individually, and even as a whole planet, a speck of a speck of a speck, ad infinitum … What you take from this is up to you. You can despair, or you can rejoice. The world doesn’t care about you. Your petty troubles are just that. Petty. There’s no reason to get all worked up about everything. Or anything, even. You just get the one life, so enjoy it while it lasts. Be nice to people. Make friends. Have fun. Love somebody. Love everybody. And be happy.

That’s my boy (I’m smiling when I say that). Reading that was a ‘wake up!’ moment for me, and made me realize that I’m faced with two choices:

• Worry, complain, and basically bore the shit out of everyone, including myself.

• See things differently.

I have a horror of being bored and of boring others. It’s like a little hell on earth, isn’t it? Stuck in the same room with some boring git you can’t get away from. And the fact that I was the boring git actually brought tears to my eyes (but come to think of it, that’s not hard to do anymore, is it?). My gawd, I was turning into (NAME REDACTED IN CASE ONE OF MY NUMEROUS RELATIVES READS THIS AND GETS THE JUNGLE DRUMS THUMPING, AGAIN)!

There is always something you can do. That is my firm belief, even though I had forgotten it for a while. So what I’m going to do is make myself feel better.

I could write a list here of the wonderful things in my life, and it would go on for pages and pages, but I won’t (remember, I’m trying to stop being the boring git). I’ll just think of them, instead (I’m smiling, again), and I’ll tell you a few things that I’m doing:

I’m listening to more music. Music feeds the soul. Let me just share with you the immortal words of Anthony Kiedis.

Give it away give it away give it away give it away
now
Give it away give it away give it away give it away
now
Give it away give it away give it away give it away
now
I can’t tell if I’m a kingpin or a pauper

Greedy little people in a sea of distress

Keep your more to receive your less

Unimpressed by material excess

Love is free love me say hell yes

Oh, just let Anthony say it, ’cause he does it so much better:

I’m going back to volunteering once a week. I used to volunteer for CROW, but that’s in Florida. If I can’t find an animal hospital or something similar, I’m going to volunteer at the library. They’ll let me put books away or something, I’m sure.

I’m giving away a t-shirt or something else with a lovely design on it every week for the rest of the year. You can sign up for the t-shirt drawing by clicking on that link, or by going here: Queen Vintage. I like knowing that someone who’s been impacted by the economic downturn, just as I have, can have something they want even if they can’t afford it. Also, if I don’t use my own designs, I’m using the designs or photography of my friends, which gives me another way to give someone something. Double whammy. I’m charging this one off to advertising, but really it’s because it makes me feel good. I want to make my life more enjoyable, and I’m a firm believer that if you have a full life and you try to keep everything all to yourself, your life will get very small. But if you give something away, the world gets bigger and better, and so do you.

That’s a partial list, and it’s working for me so far. What do you do when life acts like a monkey in the zoo? (Somebody asked me what this meant, and I thought it really clear. What do monkeys do in the zoo? They throw shit at you, of course. Have you people never been to the zoo? If you go, I have some advice: don’t stand too close to the monkeys.)

Leave some comments, or somethin’.

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Only 50 pages in, I began to notice a disturbing thing. All the women were thin (or battling to be thin), driven, and desperate. They enjoyed nothing about themselves. A character was derided for having a figure flaw (one that can’t be changed with surgery or lifestyle changes), anyone who gained weight was a bad person, and all of a sudden I wasn’t liking this book so much. What had started out to be amusing was now making me sick to my stomach.

And it started me thinking. I decided to scrap the review and write about this thing that really bothered me.

Why do women do this to themselves? Why is there such a push to be thin, to be perfect, to not have any visible flaws? What the hell is that all about?

So I did some research. I read some books, I watched some movies, I talked to my daughter and her friends. And then I found out something really disturbing.

It’s starting young, this obsession with physical beauty. Every single one of the teenage girls that I spoke with knew at least one person with an eating disorder. Most of them knew more than one person with either bulimia or anorexia nervosa. Further research revealed that the mortality rate associated with anorexia nervosa is 12 times higher than the death rate of ALL causes of death for females 15 – 24 years old. And a study by the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders reported that 5 – 10% of anorexics die within 10 years after contracting the disease; 18-20% of anorexics will be dead after 20 years and only 30 – 40% ever fully recover.

I watched a DVD by Nova Dying to Be Thin, and was appalled.

I looked at magazines, both fashion and otherwise, I paid attention to women on television and movies, I read and read and read. The news wasn’t all bad: German magazine Brigitte said they would no longer shoot professional models in the interest of their demographic. [And then Karl Lagerfield (may he and Chanel rot in hell forever) said in response: "No one wants to see curvy women. You've got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly."]

Dove has a real beauty campaign that is designed to make young girls love their bodies and their looks as they really are, and not some sick idealization that some eejit has dreamed up and bombarded us with.

Glamour magazine did a nude photo shoot of a plus sized model, and the response was so overwhelmingly positive that they’re doing another one, and it, too, is designed to make women love their bodies as they are.

But there are only a few good examples. Just a few, in a deluge of millions of bad ones.

I’m not a beautiful woman. Never have been. I’m neither thin nor svelte, I’ve got a big ass even when I’m thin, I’ve got disproportionately large hands and feet, my teeth aren’t as white as snow … I could go on and on. I got flaws, baby. There ain’t no hidin’ em.

Here’s a picture, to prove it. It’s a pretty honest one, too. It was taken on vacation, after a long day of walking up and down the hills in San Francisco, and there’s not a scrap of make-up left on my face. Take a good, long look.

See how my whole face squinches up when I smile? Notice the nearly-imperceptible eyebrows? The dead-white skin, the big nose, the big teeth?

Yet … I like what I see when I look in the mirror.

A couple of years ago, when a box at work fell from a top shelf onto my nose, they sent me to a plastic surgeon to have a consult. It was really to make sure I wasn’t going to have any further sinus problems, but he seemed more concerned with my appearance. He told me he could fix that ‘huge bump’ on my nose and my overlarge nostrils, and while he was at it, he could get rid of all those wrinkles around my eyes. We could even work it so that the company’s insurance company would pay for most of it, and my insurance might take care of the rest.

Well. I was pissed. I told him that those weren’t wrinkles, they were laugh lines, and I’d worked damned hard to put those there. I’d be keeping them, thanks, and the bump on my nose, too. Which, by the way, wasn’t huge and had been there my entire life and I kinda liked.

I fumed for weeks over that, and I admit I did a lot of staring in the mirror for a while. Eventually I shrugged it off and went back to liking the way that I looked again.

When I smile, people smile back. Complete strangers strike up conversations with me – sometimes very interesting ones – and I’ve never had a problem getting a date in my life. For my 40th birthday, a group of friends took me to a small bar with a postage stamp dance floor and a three piece band that played a huge mix of content. The place was filled with people from their 20’s to their 60’s. I left with 7 or 8 phone numbers, and one of my friends (who is a catalog model, and very, very attractive – and yes, she deserves the very, very ) was kinda miffed. She couldn’t understand why she sat by herself half the night and you couldn’t drag me off the dance floor. I danced with Goth boys, scruffy bikers, old men, young men, handsome men, not-so-handsome men … you get the picture. I never sat out, even once. She didn’t mean to be rude, but she really couldn’t understand. She’d bought into the whole idea that you can’t be really attractive unless you’re thin and beautiful.

It’s not true.

True beauty is not simply what’s on the surface. When you feel good about yourself and who you are, when you carry yourself with confidence and self-acceptance, that makes you beautiful. Beauty is in the mind, not in the body.

So why do I have confidence in myself and my attractiveness, even though I’m not classically beautiful, you might ask. The truth is, I didn’t always. My teenage years were spent in an agony of self-hate. I dieted, I exercised, I did things that were bad for my body and my soul. But as I grew older, I learned to love myself. Part of the reason is because I had a daughter, and I wanted her to think herself beautiful (which she is, and she does). I realized that I couldn’t teach her to love herself while I hated myself. So I stopped hating myself. It wasn’t easy, but it was simple.

All around the world, women are alternately starving and gorging, obsessing and hating and striving to remove that which ultimately makes us female: our bodies and our curves.

Stop, I say. Stop. Celebrate your femininity. Say it out loud, right now: I have breasts. I have an ass. I’m supposed to. I’m a woman.

Do you think yourself beautiful? If not, here are some things that I did that can help you accomplish this:

Listen to your body. Eat healthy food, and eat when you are hungry.

Be realistic about the size and shape you are likely to be. If you’re not meant to be a size 6, don’t try to be one.

Exercise regularly in an enjoyable way, regardless of size. Don’t try to spot reduce, because there’s no such a damned thing. Exercise for fun and to make yourself more strong.

Forgive yourself for not being perfect. Accept that some things about you are beautiful. When you look in the mirror, pick out something that you like. Do you have beautiful skin? What about a pretty smile? Are your legs strong? Do you have shapely hands? Do the same thing internally. Perhaps you’re a good organizer. Maybe you’re a great friend.

And speaking of friends: Ask for support and encouragement from your friends and family when life is stressful. If you don’t have a good back-up system, you need to get one. It doesn’t have to be a traditional one: a lot of my friends are online and we’ve never met, but they are just as important to my well-being as the friends I meet for dinner and drinks.

Decide how you want to spend your time – pursuing the “perfect body” or enjoying your life.

Love yourself, and make it easier for others to love you, too.

ps If you want to know how to dress for your size and shape, watch What Not To Wear. They deal with a huge array of sizes and shapes, and foster the idea that women of any size can be attractive.

pps Karl Lagerfield, kiss my fat ass.

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I’m a John Sandford fan. There’s no doubt about that. I love his Lucas Davenport character, and was iffy about his last book featuring another character – Virgil Flowers – as his main protagonist in Dark of the Moon. Though it moves like lightning, Sandford keeps you guessing, and the pages kept on turning, it was a big meh for me. Virgil seemed bland despite his quirks, the women were one-dimensional, and I didn’t like his love interests. At all.

But that’s all changed with Rough Country

That fuckin’ Flowers, as he is known affectionately in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, has come into his own. Virgil is fully fleshed out and his quirks are amusing (instead of getting on my nerves and making me mutter to myself: Grow the fuck up, Virgil! Yes, yes, I do know he’s a fictional character.) and in more than a few scenes I laughed out loud. He fishes on BCA time, he pulls a fishing boat behind his BCA vehicle, and he sleeps with attractive women every chance he gets – and sometimes they’re suspects in the crimes he’s investigating.

But that doesn’t mean there’s not plenty of suspense and mystery in this novel. This time around with Virgil, Sandford has tightened up the storyline, and it all rings true.

Virgil’s competing in a fishing tournament when he gets a call from Lucas Davenport to investigate a murder at a nearby woman-only resort. Virgil finds a second, related murder, and then the fun really begins. There’s a bisexual country music singer who is seemingly linked to the crimes, the waiters at the resort double as paid boytoys, and the gorgeous accountant at the resort is in love with the country singer and tangled up in a peripheral way with another suspect. In a twist that I found particularly amusing, Virgil just can’t get a break when it comes to his own love life.

I enjoyed the hell out of Rough Country. I read and read until the wee hours of the morning, even though I knew I had to be up at 7 am the next day.

It was worth the missed sleep.

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After a small hiatus, the bookclub is back. We’re going to read Wicked Prey by John Sandford as our September bookclub Read.

From the inside cover:

For twenty years, John Sandford’s novels have been beloved for their “ingenious plots, vivid characters, crisp dialogue and endless surprises” (The Washington Post), and nowhere are those more in evidence than in the sudden twists and shocks of Wicked Prey.

The Republicans are coming to St. Paul for their convention. Throwing a big party is supposed to be fun, but crashing the party are a few hard cases the police would rather stayed away. Chief among them is a crew of professional stickup men who’ve spotted several lucrative opportunities, ranging from political moneymen with briefcases full of cash to that armored-car warehouse with the weakness in its security system. All that’s headache enough for Lucas Davenport-but what’s about to hit him is even worse.

A while back, a stray bullet put a pimp and petty thief named Randy Whitcomb in a wheelchair, and, ever since, the man has been nursing his grudge into a full head of psychotic steam. He blames Davenport for the bullet, but it’s no fun just shooting him. That wouldn’t be painful enough. Not when Davenport has a pretty fourteen-year-old adopted daughter that Whitcomb can target instead. . . .

And then there’s the young man with the .50 caliber sniper rifle and the right- wing-crazy background, roaming through a city filled with the most powerful politicians on earth. . . . Rich with his brilliant trademark suspense and some of the best characters in suspense fiction, Wicked Prey is further proof that “Sandford is one of the most consistently entertaining crime writers working today” (Booklist).

Sounds good.

Join us in the forums to discuss.

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I picked this book up when I knew I had an afternoon that would be spent waiting in a doctor’s office. I picked it up purely because it had the name James Patterson on the cover and it wasn’t about any damned flying children. I was already reading before I realized that there was another name, Michael Ledwidge, at the bottom.

Sigh.

I have no idea about any of Michael Ledwidge’s books, but I’m not a fan of this one. And it sure doesn’t make me want to run out and buy one of his books, either.

It’s written all in the first person, which is nothing new for James Patterson, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that I can neither like nor sympathize with his main character. Lauren Stillman is a cop, and she continually breaks the law and bends the rules to suit herself. There’s no reason of justice here, either: she protects a cold-blooded murderer simply because it will make things easier for her and she doesn’t want to mess up her so-called perfect life.

I know people who stay in a terrible situation because it’s easier. Maybe this is my problem with this book; it brings up my feelings of resentment for those who waste their life. Maybe I shouldn’t judge.

Or maybe it’s just a bad book.

The book is superficial, cloying, and ultimately mind-numbing. I didn’t like any of it. At all. I was bored to death, and annoyed at myself for not reading part of it before I bought, especially considering those boring-arse Maximum Ride books he’s been writing lately.

James Patterson has always been a good way to while away an afternoon; he’s not deep, but his characters are enjoyable, and the plots aren’t laughable. I love his Alex Cross character. Lately, however, his name doesn’t guarantee me a good read.

If you want to read one of his books, I recommend that you skip this one and go for Kiss the Girls .

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All this change is stirring up old feelings that, truthfully, I dealt with by not dealing with them. Even no decision is a decision after a while. It’s not so much the daughter going off to college; truly, I did most of that adjustment when my son left 3 years ago. It was hard, and I’m sure I’ll be sad for a while, but it’s not really the thing that’s bothering me.

It’s the moving. To be more precise, it’s the moving near my relatives.

I have a complicated relationship with my family. It’s not anything to do with my elderly aunt; I get on like a house on fire with the crazy, mean old bat (and that is said with love, because I adore her bad, bitch self). It’s the rest of them who worry me.

Most of my immediate family either don’t like me, or can’t accept who I really am. (I’m not including my children in that list, by the way.) That’s not self-pity; it’s a hard-earned admission of the truth. It took me lots of years and tears to realize it; it still causes me pain, but it doesn’t paralyze me the way that it once did.

Because I write it out.

A study published in 1992 found that there are two types of ‘outsider writers’, or writers dealing with a number of roles or problems.

The first type feel alienated or estranged or have difficulty living with the tension created by conflicting identities, and they see themselves as less empowered writers.

The second type are able to juggle their lives, and they feel able to move with ease and confidence through varied writing situations. They are what sociologist Patricia Hill Collins calls “outsiders within,” writers who see their conflicting identities as an opportunity rather than a barrier to voice.

I used to be the first type. Now I’m the second.

As a writer, it’s all about acceptance and truth. That’s what you’re searching for as a writer, or it’s what I’m searching for, anyway. You can’t write at your top potential unless you accept who you are, accept your true voice, and that includes your conflicts, both resolved and unresolved.

And though it’s hard, I pour my pain and my fear, my life experiences, and, I admit it, my crazy family dynamics into my writing. And as I write, I understand a little more, and maybe I forgive a little as well. Every day, that lump behind my heart softens a little as I siphon it onto a page. I’m learning to be a better writer, and, I hope, a better person.

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